VideoHound's DVD Guide

A book review originally posted to Amazon in 2001

Not quite the pedigree one would expect

Having been an avid and exclusive user of the VideoHound Golden Movie Retriever (GMR) since 1996, I had high expectations of this DVD review guide sporting the VideoHound moniker. Unfortunately, many of the qualities I'd come to appreciate in the venerable Hound are largely lacking in this DVD guide — most notably, a sense of objectivity.

First, it should be pointed out that each entry in this guide is comprised of two reviews: a review of the movie and a review of technical qualities of the DVD. As far as the technical DVD reviews are concerned, the editor(s) confesses in the one of the introductory chapters:

"It would be wonderful if all of us — reviewers and readers — could have state-of-the-art 'reference' systems... But that's not the case, and so we don't presume to make definitive judgements."

The problem is, one simply must have reference quality equipment to properly review DVDs. Otherwise, why bother going to the trouble of "reviewing" the technical aspects of each disc if the unknown quality of the reviewer's equipment is going to cast a questionable shadow on each review? That said, one good thing I can say about the technical aspects of the reviews in this guide is that each review list all of the special features of each disc, as well as the aspect ratio, the packaging format (i.e., snap case, keep case, jewel case etc.), the list price and so on. Most useful were the reviewers' comments on the cast/crew commentary tracks included on many DVDs, which seemed to be less biased than the reviewers' comments on the movies themselves.

As for bias, the actual movie reviews presented in this DVD Guide were what was most disappointing to me. One of the advantages of the classic VideoHound GMR is that there are many contributors, a practice which seems to engender balanced, fair reviews. Although this guide also features contributions from several reviewers (the vast majority, however, being handled by editor Mayo and chief contributor Jim Olenski), I noticed a very odd and disconcerting practice that was employed numerous times: that of taking a film review from the classic VideoHound GMR and changing a couple of words here and there to support a newly altered rating (changing the 'spin' if you will); or else, incredibly, changing the rating without changing a word of the review. In a few cases, the movie was completely re-reviewed, and a different "verdict" passed on its merits, which would be fine except that we now have two inconsistent reviews of the same movie, both of which are apparently advocated by The Hound.

Also, when an oddball euro-cult flick such as LISA AND THE DEVIL (originally dismissed with a "woof" by the GMR, which was perhaps a bit extreme) is suddenly bestowed a "four-bone" rating (a Masterpiece!) by the reviewer; or conversely, a moderately successful, more well-received movie such as MYSTERY MEN is given a "woof" (the actual VideoHound GMR gives it a more fair rating of 2½ bones), one tends to become wary of excessive bias in the reviewer. It goes beyond one person's opinion of this or that movie: a reviewer should try to put aside their likes and dislikes and concentrate on the movie's objective merits and demerits. Having used this VideoHound DVD guide now for about eight months, this annoying tendency towards subjective bias is something that is seen to come through in the reviews all too frequently.

So my advice is: For good and fair movie reviews, buy the latest VideoHound Golden Movie Retriever instead. For good technical DVD reviews, try the Widescreen Review.